The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Digital video is often compressed prior to storage and/or transmission. Lossy compression techniques may be used to conserve storage space and/or transmission time associated with compressed video, but lossy compression may also introduce visual distortions known as compression artifacts. Block noise is a type of compression artifact generated when a compression scheme segments a video frame into distinct regions, or blocks, and compresses each block separately. Since each block is processed and compressed separately, the compressed blocks may exhibit discontinuities in pixel data values at their boundaries with other blocks. Further, these discontinuities may become readily visible at higher compression settings. This results in blocking artifacts, which may be particularly pronounced on high-resolution and/or large-size displays. Different compression algorithms use different block sizes. For example, the MPEG-2 standard uses 8×8 block sizes, while the H.264 standard may use more than one block size to compress a single video frame.